Liu Xue, Henan Province
In 1991, since we were enduring the hardships of family conflict, my husband and I believed in the Lord Jesus together. From then on, we no longer quarreled. We read the Bible and attended gatherings together very zealously. Not long afterward, my husband left the Three-Self Church and switched over to the Stream of Recovery. In regards to the matter of my husband switching denominations, I did not mind. I believed that as long as we believed in one God, it did not matter which denomination we belonged to.
In 1995, my husband started to persuade me by every possible means to enter the Stream of Recovery. If I did not go, he would not be happy. Afterward, he once again allowed the leaders and fellow workers to come and persuade me. However, I was unable to accept the doctrines that they were teaching and I remained a member of the Three-Self Church. Since our doctrines of faith were not the same, my husband and I no longer spoke the same language and we started to grow distant. When my husband brought fellow workers from the Stream of Recovery upstairs to host gatherings, I did not participate. When my brothers and sisters from the Three-Self Church came to our place to attend gatherings, my husband did not join. In our daily lives, I sold glass frames and my husband produced art layouts. We worked on our own businesses, kept our own accounts and earned our own money. I cooked my own food and ate it myself, and so did my husband. It was as if there were two separate families in our household. In the spring of 1997, I moved elsewhere and I told my 11-year-old son, “From now on, your father is not allowed to come into the house. If someone asks about your father, you must tell them that he is dead!” I suffered a lot due to the fact that the churches my husband and I attended were incompatible. At this time, I discovered that the elders and leaders of the Three-Self Church that had believed for decades were in fact the same as common people. In public, they mocked and satirized each other, formed gangs and fomented dispute and jealousy. In light of this situation, all I could do was come before the Lord with tears in my eyes and pray, “Lord! Why is it that those who believe in You must separate into so many different denominations? Moreover, even those that are in the same denomination cannot coexist together. Why is this the case? Lord! When can all these denominations unite? When will my husband and I reunite and serve You with one heart? …” Afterward, in order to search for the way of unification, I visited other denominations such as the Justification by Faith Church, the Born Again Church, the Eternal Salvation Church, and the Praise Church. The result was that I saw that at the same time as each denomination boasted about being the denomination that was most in accordance with God’s intentions, its own members were clearly fighting and competing and excluding each other. After I visited these denominations, not only was I unable to find the way of unification, on the contrary, I lost the faith that I originally had. In the dead of the night, when I reflected on the few years that I believed in God and this situation, I shed silent tears and my heart felt intense despair and pain. I did not know where my path was taking me.
